


A cartography of incomprehension

by laughingpineapple



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Gen, Hawk somewhat regretting that some of his friends are white people but being a good sport about it, Maps, Post-Post-Finale, Shifting Sheriffs and Also Owls, Treat, Walks In The Woods, Yearning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-16 02:06:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13626291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: Cooper hasn't stopped trusting that ancient maps will lead him to a place both wonderful and strange - or at least closer to Harry, to understanding Harry, bridging the gap the decades have carved between them.





	A cartography of incomprehension

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bold_seer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bold_seer/gifts).



 

“They’re not even places, past the black lines,” Hawk would later explain to him. An unsaid ‘...dumbass’ hung in the air as the elderly Sheriff paused to sip his beer. He let it linger.

“They're times. They're commentaries. They're warnings, or hopes. I'll be square with you, Cooper: the way you did it, you could've grabbed a grocery list sideways to use as a compass for picking your path instead and it would've served you just as well.”

 

***

 

Dale Cooper left his car by the red dot under the fire. That was what the buckskin map said, its reproduction stored as a digital photograph on the disorienting technological upgrade that was his cellphone. The local topographic map, lent to him by Hawk under strict intimation to keep it dry and properly folded, placed that parking spot deep within Ghostwood territory, a couple of miles south of Owl Cave.

The red dot under the fire, Cooper whispered to himself as he adjusted his backpack’s straps. A dot for a beginning, the first step of a journey; the fire which, since Prometheus’ time, has illuminated the human drive to understand and which, as Cooper knew all too well deep under his burnt skin, flares ever brighter on the pyre of humanity’s failures to achieve even a modicum of that understanding. This walk, then, would start from hubris and from failures, he said to another button on his phone, saving a brief audio record with no title and no addressee. The red dot under the fire was his beginning. Cooper would reflect on the secrets deep within the color red as he stepped further into the woods.

 

He crossed the mountain river that was common to both maps. A line of gasoline polluted it, rainbow stream within the stream. A lump of discarded old furniture, etched by the water and painted by moss, made a dam next to the ford. Cooper asked himself if he could possibly have recognized a chair.

 

So much of his life had been spent staring at endless expanses of the color red and wishing he could see behind its veil. He wondered, briefly, if that was the point.

 

The map - the map of his quest, the buckskin relic which Hawk had agreed to show to him - promised that, beyond the woods and under the stars, he would find a cowboy who would tell him of the fire. Not that military-issued prints didn't hold promises of their own hidden between their contour lines, but they spoke of shrines and tunnels, windmills and reservoirs: places, not people. Not the kinds of secrets in the woods Dale Cooper needed in those days. He checked the path one last time, gingerly folded the paper along its intended lines and abandoned it in a side pocket of his backpack's, next to a divulgation book on XXI century astronomical advancements and to coffee-flavored energy bars.

 

In an unmarked clearing, an oasis of pale green grass where the endless rows of dark firs parted like curtains, a man in a Stetson was fishing in a pond.

“Cooper. You won't find Harry here,” Frank said to him as he heard him approach.

“Why not?” asked Cooper.

“Why, because I'm here!” Frank laughed. The sharp light of the late afternoon deepened the lines that age had carved on his face. He looked older than all of them, ancient and rooted in the earth like the trees that surrounded them.

“But I feel like I don't know the man he is today and I have come to find him,” Cooper said, or thought he said, in a voice soft enough to wrap itself around his feelings for his old love without breaking them.

A gust of wind rustled the dark trees.

“Harry is not here,” he said, when Frank did not answer.

The surface of the pond remained unperturbed.

“We don't share fishing spots,” came the eventual explanation.

Harry was not there. Frank's silhouette traced his brother's absence, the man he wasn't, the man he wanted to be, Sheriff before and after him, a softer jacket on broader shoulders. This negative image called to him, glowing in the afternoon sun. But he could not tell if this calm, these deep roots, the shadow under that hat were answers to any of his questions, so he took his leave.

 

The path through the woods twisted and turned before Cooper thought that he should have asked Frank about their teenage years, or the reason why they did not share fishing spots. But when he went back, his feet led him to a different, empty clearing, or Frank had packed up his chair, his rod, his bottles and buckets and left before dark. An owl hooted overhead.

 

So he crossed the woods as the night fell. Looking back to the West, he could see the peaks of White Tail and Blue Pine mountains shine under the moonlight, and the town's electricity buzzing underneath.

 

Dale Cooper set up his tent on a gentle slope under a sky full of bright stars. As he sat down on its threshold, bonfire crackling, a sandwich in one hand and his book in the other (like in peaceful memories from his boyhood that he could never quite place), he was struck by an intense loneliness. The realization tore him apart like a burst of lightning: Harry was not there. In that moment, Harry Truman must have been home in his cottage, making dinner, humming along to an old disc, brittle and kind and alone while Cooper had, once again, disappeared beneath the trees, miles and miles away. Three decades of solitude had hardened him and crawling out of his death bed to get back on his feet had wounded him in ways Cooper, who had lived without sleep nor illnesses for an instant and a thousand years at once, could not begin to understand. In that moment, under a sky full of bright stars, he saw the futility of the distance he had put between them. He missed him. He missed him terribly. It felt like he had reached the end of the world only to see with unshakable clarity that the answer he was looking for had been waiting for him at home all along.

 

At sunrise, he grabbed his stuff and went back to the path, to his car, to the town, to the other end of the town where its former Sheriff was feeding six chickens and a stray cat. Harry didn't ask - he never did. He opened his arms so Dale could dig his fingers in the creases of his thick flannel shirt and rest his head on Harry's shoulder, and know they still had days together ahead of them.

He didn't understand that warmth, but it was real.

 

***

 

Hawk raised his glass. “But if it worked, tell you what, I'll drink to sheer dumb luck. That, too, is a path we're allowed to walk, some days.”

Cooper toasted to that.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been wanting to write about that map ever since it came up on screen, thanks for the prompt :D as for why Hawk showed it to Coop in the first place, I don't think it would have been hard to bullshit a believable reason but I thought it would've shifted the focus of the fic so I kept it handwavey...


End file.
